


The Pines Family Scrapbook

by Sarielle



Series: Shermaine Pines AU [7]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Drabbles, Excerpts, Family Bonding, Gen, Other, Shermaine Pines AU, mixed genre
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-05-21 05:26:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6039937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarielle/pseuds/Sarielle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of various family moments within the Shermaine Pines AU Verse not captured in the main story. Expect Spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Reintegration

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly don't have anything coherent to say because I died of happiness watching the finale. I just wanted to work through some things in this canon, and show Ford coming back into his extended family and the Stans strengthening bond. I'm actually genuinely surprised how well things from this AU held up in the end. Dipper's name is gonna stay Alexander even when his real name is confirmed jysk. A shout out to WDW for listening to my incoherent hollering yesterday, thanks dude!

Ford Pines was getting to know his family.

He never expected it, after his upbringing, after what happened with Stanley family had never once factored into young pre-portal Stanford’s rather extravagant twenty-year plan. Getting a boyfriend had thrown a big enough spanner in the works. He hadn’t been factoring in any kind of inter-personal relationships. Ford’s plan was primarily research oriented: Get Published. Get Funded. Get Recognised.

Now that part of his life was behind him, but what did that leave?

 Here he was in his 60s, retirement age, completely at a loss on how to spend the rest of his life.

He wasn’t looking for this helter-skelter scrappy brood of brown-haired twins and siblings, nieces and nephews. All bickering and banter and a love of astronomy.   He had no concept of the sheer scale of what he was gaining when he agreed to go with his brother to Shermy’s house in San Francisco for Passover.

Ford was expecting the only thing the Pines Family has taught him to expect: a door in the face. But his sister, dear God, _his sister_.  She was having none of her father’s bullshit.

It had been months now and Ford loved that woman like a moth loved a flame. Sure, she was sometimes draining to be around but he was still in awe of her simply because she was so… _vivacious._ She was so loud and brash yet usually understanding.

He was constantly flaking off layers of her, like bark. The sharp Jersey accent that thirty odd years in California had yet to shake and the tough suffer-no-fools attitude that could only come from growing up with their parents. Then in matter of minutes her ridiculous emotional blubbering at any trivial thing, her impulsiveness, her dry awful humour. Shermy was always there to listen, though he hadn’t yet had the courage to come dragging up the past to her, his not-so-baby sister. But he would, one day, he would.  

“I don’t want to force my way; I just don’t know how to fit in here. I’m such an outsider.” He’d said one evening. They’d come up to San Francisco to spend more time with the extended family before they brought the kids back down to Oregon, to stay for the summer. Ford and Stan were staying with Shermy and David just for a couple of days and Ford was still confounded by his sister’s brood. There was always so much going on.

Spending time with Stan was one thing, that was like an old muscle memory, a jigsaw puzzle that slowly slotted itself back together over time. These others, his nieces, his nephew, the twins, his sister. He didn’t have any memories to base his interactions on. It was new and it was people and he didn’t cope well with either of those things. He still felt frustratingly awkward in places.

“Just observe, Ford.” His sister had said like it was the plainest damn thing in the world. She plopped herself into the sofa next to him, folding her knees up underneath her, sat close enough so their arms were touching but quite noticeably out of his personal space.

“Look at Stanley…” Shermy smiled, thin red lips curving up in a smile so reminiscent of their mother, Ford’s breath caught in his throat. “He wasn’t always in the kids’ lives like this. He wasn’t always in mine neither. He didn’t meet the girls til they were five. He was in the place you’re in now. He found his niche his own way.”

Ford snorted. “What’s that then? Stan’s, how did you put it? his _niche_? Cheap tricks?” He’d meant it in jest but his sister didn’t seem to take it as such.

Shermy scowled. “Mock ‘im all you want, Stanford, but Stan’s a protector. He looks out for the different.”

This wasn’t exactly news to Ford, but it wasn’t the words he expected to come spilling from his little sister’s mouth. She didn’t even know about what had happened last Summer in terms of the apocalypse. Poor Shermy was still coming with grips with the fact her brother who ‘died’ when she was in middle school faked his own death and her other brother had been trapped the whole time in some sci-fi scenario in another universe.

There were enough bizarre tropes there to fill a low-grade telenovela and his sister was a great deal more religious than Ford and his twin. He didn’t know how well she’d react to the occult. No, it was better Shermy not learn about the whole Bill situation, nor the fiasco with Stanley’s memory. She’d seen enough heartbreak for one life.

“Come Again?” he asked instead, quirking an eyebrow. Across the room Mabel and Stan seemed to be making a very aggressive business partnership as they cleaned out Dipper and Isaac of Monopoly money.

She didn’t say anything but leaned over and place her hand on his knee. Ford impulsively placed his own hand over the top. His palm looked giant over his sister’s tiny hands. Six fingers closed over the top of five.

 _‘Hi-Six, Sixer’_ He could hear the childhood memory of his brother’s voice whenever he looked at his hands. It had cut him deep during their estrangement but now it was a nice memory, it told him he was loved.  _He looks out for the different_. Huh. Trust his journalist of a sister to say something so important in such few words.

Shermy was watching his expression with an intense focus, golden brown eyes tracking his body language so fiercely Ford felt like a slide under a microscope

“Observe, Ford. You’re a scientist. Observe First, Questions later. You’ll find you’re place in time.” 

“Okay. I’ll bite. What’s _your_ ‘niche’ then Sherm? I mean, surely all I bring to the table is some weird life stories and my brain.”

Shermy cackled, her fluffy bob moving around her like feathers. “Me? Oh honey, I run this show! Our family is a smoothly oiled machine, Stanford. Someone’s gotta keep these fuckerinos in check.”

“A smoothly oiled machine?” Ford echoed, chuckling. Shermy’s face cracked into a matching grin.

“Ok, well…” She gave a little shrug.  “Maybe more like a run-down Chevy…” She paused. “A run-down Chevy where the bumper’s falling off, but the point of the metaphor still stands. It’s mine, I’m driving and I love it.”

Ford laughed at that. He leaned back against the couch cushions and squeezed his sister’s hand.

Across the room Stan was grilling Dipper on his upcoming bar mitzvah. A soft undercurrent of validation to his words, though true to Stan’s nature they were gruff as ever. Dipper’s expression shone at any tiny acknowledgment of his masculinity, his gaze sliding up from the board game to his Grunkle’s face, and down again.

He was always like this with the family, Ford noted. Shermy was right there. Stan was a protector. An image arose in his mind’s eye of a freckled faced kid all t-shirts and band-aids with his dukes up. Stan, the younger twin, was always there to fend off his brother’s bullies.

What did that make Ford? The victim, the one protected? That was a passive role, that brought nothing to the table. No one needed another helpless soul.

“Hey, Ford?” His sister had slipped sideways in her seat. Her head was resting against his arm.  From the corner of his vision he could see her eyes were closed.

“Mm?”

“You don’t need to stress about it. I can practically _hear_ your old brain grinding away. I’m not asking you to earn your place here, we already love ya. You don’t get literally fuckin’ sorted into a role in the family. I’m just saying, it took time for me, it took time for Stan, if you need time to get your bearings there’s nothin’ wrong with that.

He smiled. Was he really that obvious. He squeezed his sister’s hand again.

“I guess so Shermy.” He said, gently. “Thank you.”

 There was a lull in the conversation. Shermy’s breath was deep and easy, her fingers laced with Ford’s own. A small smile on her red lips. A brief little snapshot of serenity.

Ford glanced around the room without a word. 

He was getting to know his family.

For the twins it had come so _easy._

Mabel was firmly anti-crusts on bread, going as far as to call it a political stance. Crusts, as she said, were the Brussel sprouts of baked goods. She called them ‘breadgetables’ and even at the relatively mature age of almost 14 would protest their existence until Stanley or her mother cut them off for her. Mabel didn’t know or care about random trivia but she could tell you the favourite colour of everyone she’d ever talked to and had made Ford a handy-dandy Pines family favourite colour cheat sheet for him to use in case conversation lagged.

Dipper was more like Stanley, then Ford had originally assumed. The kid kept a collection of old-fashioned adventure stories, the same archaeological explorer’s adventures that Stan and Ford grew up on. The kid acted disparaging of his sister’s adoration of 80s rom-coms but he was just as naively romantic as she was, if not more. Dipper wasn’t into hard science, for the method or the principle. He was in it for the “cool” science fiction opportunities like universe jumping, or ghost hunting. Plus, from Dipper’s journal entries alone Ford reckoned he’d make a good writer, much like Shermy but he doubted the boy could sit down long enough to get anything down.  

Thinking of Shermy, Ford had to admit that his sister was the most frustratingly competitive woman he’d ever met (and yes that included their own mother). The few days the Stans had come up for Passover they’d spent the evening hours bonding the only way the Pines siblings really knew: over whiskey and poker, like three tired echoes of their father.  For someone so dedicated to looking after her family Shermaine turned viciously cutthroat if you gave her a pack of cards. When the kids were around however, she softened like butter, her rough profanity-peppered speech giving way into a stream of “fudge” and “sugar” and other more creative bumbled oaths that made Ford chuckle.

There were the others. The ones he didn’t know that well and frankly made him nervous. His nephew Isaac, the twins father, who seemed rather wary of Ford and Stanley (a fact not helped by the unwelcome addition of Waddles to his household.) but kept to himself mostly. They not had much time to talk.

Then there were the other twins: Shermy’s daughters Sam and Miriam. They were an interesting pair and their own issues meant they spent of most of their shared family time squabbling amongst themselves. Ford and Sam got on very well, she was finishing up her doctorate at the Illustrious West Coast Tech. (which Sam had taken great pains to assure him was not as great as the brochures made out and largely a rich boys’ club) She was probably the easiest to talk to because discussions of theoretical physics didn’t require anywhere near the emotional energy as other types of conversation.

Ford hadn’t spoken much to Miriam. He was still leery of her past mistreatment of Dipper but he could at least appreciate she was largely in the same position as he was: a stranger re-joining their family.  At least she was here, she was still trying her best.  That was all Ford could do as well. He wrapped an arm around his sister’s shoulders and pulled her closer.

 Across the room there was a great deal of hooting and hi-fiving going around. Mabel was making it rain paper $100 bills over Stanley’s head, decreeing herself the ‘Goddess of Fortune’ while her father laughed and her twin rolled his eyes good-naturedly in the background.

Stanley looked over in his brother’s direction, his grey hair all mussed, and a goofy grin on his face and he shot Ford a wink. Ford just smiled right back. This didn’t feel _that_ alien, after all.

 

* * *

 

They left back for Gravity Falls in the morning. The twins’ parents brought them back over with their luggage to see them off. Outside by the car port, Laura Pines was trying to get in enough lectures to tide her over for the month she wouldn’t see them.

“Alexander, If I hear you’ve been fighting.” She started to say.

Dipper rolled his eyes “I know…I know…”

“He won’t, Mom. I’ll keep him out harm’s way.” Mabel intervened.

“Oh you are just as bad young lady! Don’t think I haven’t forgotten the stunt with the bees… Just be good for your Grunkles. Both of you, and Mabel honey, no more animals this year. Promise?” She shot daggers back over her shoulder in Stan’s direction. Ley in a display of his usual smartassery blew her a kiss.

Mabel nodded solemnly. “Promise, Mom. The only animals I’ll bring home are Waddles and Dipper.”

“Hey!” Dipper bopped her on the arm.

Laura chuckled at that.

“Good enough for me.” She bent down to kiss both of them. She didn’t have to bend down far for her son. Dipper had shot up a great deal in the past year and was now several inches taller than his sister.

Ford was watching this all from the doorway, between his sister and twin.

“Oh Stanley?” Shermy said, in a voice all sing-song and smiley like she was about to burst out into a musical number. A voice Ford was learning often preceded a threat.

Stan was busy trying to fit Mabel’s oversized suitcase through the front door. “Yeah, what?”

Their sister smiled. “Ford told me you two are going away in the fall?” Stan grunted a yes and she continued. “Well, if you two aren’t back from your little boat trip in time to come up for Thanksgiving, I’m gonna smack your heads together so hard you fuse into one giant knucklehead.”

Stanley blew a raspberry and heaved the bag through the door. Shermy glanced at her other brother, pulling a face in his direction. “D’you think that asshole heard me?” she asked.

“I did. Consider it duly noted, Sherm.” Said Ford hanging back behind.

Shermy kissed him, once on each cheek and looking up at him she cupped his face in her hands. “Have another great summer, Stanford.”

Ford smiled and pressed his lips to her forehead in return. “You too, little sister.”

He hadn’t planned for a family, but the one he found, the one he fell into was far better than anything he had planned in the first place. Ford waved to his sister from the passenger seat until her outline and her house was too small for him to make out anymore. He glanced across at his brother focused on the road, and the twins excitedly chatting away in the backseat and Ford relaxed.

They were going home.


	2. Age 27: Another Phone call, Another Funeral.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shermy makes a difficult phone call.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a chapter that didn't get included in the main fic because I thought it was a bit similar to other chapters. It just adds some more development in Shermy and Stan's estrangement. It's also important to show Shermy's character a bit more because she's a very frustrating and complex person to write. If you've read Next of Kin it's a very familiar situation but it's still one I wanted to go into a bit more. Of course 'Ford' going to the funeral, (and getting punched in the face- another scene I might write in here) is the event that brings the siblings back together so it's kind of important here.

 

_San Francisco, CA.  September 1 st 1997_

It was just a string of numbers on the back of a receipt. It shouldn’t have been as ominous as it felt. It shouldn't have produced such a pressure in her chest that rose and rose, cresting in a quiet sob.

“Sherm?” her neighbour Nancy’s voice from the kitchen. “Are you sure I can’t do anything, doll?”

“No, it's fine. I- just… I just- Shit.” Another gasping lungful of oxygen. Something wet rolled ignored down her cheek. She pulled a mental drawstring, bringing herself back together.

 “Can you, check my Pop’s alright with the kids in the other room, Nance? Please?”

She wasn’t going to cry again. She was a grown woman, a mother. She had shit to do. She just needed to breathe it all away.

There was sounds of footsteps in the kitchen and a slight pause. “Course I can. But don't worry about the kids, Isaac is with your dad and David’s keeping an eye on the twins.”

Shermy closed her eyes, she’d forgotten David had taken the rest of the day off work. That was a relief. “Oh god bless than man, I’m so lucky to have him Nancy.”

She could hear the smile in the other woman’s voice, though she couldn’t see her face. “-and he you, sweetheart. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

Shermy fumbled with the paper in her hand, absently twisting her rings around her finger for comfort. Her thumbprint rubbing over the opal ring her mother had given her as a wedding present. Opal. Her namesake.

 “No, thanks though. I need to call my brother.” She said, trying to make it sound casual when it was anything but. “I won’t be long, I’m sure.”

There was the noise of dishes being moved about and footsteps. The kitchen side door opened and closed and she gathered Nancy had gone.

She looked back at the receipt, it had arrived tucked into a birthday card, a few months prior. Isaac’s 10th birthday. _Happy Birthday Isaac! From Uncle Stanford,_ Isaac had gotten a birthday card every year so far despite complete radio silence from his uncle otherwise. The message stayed the same, just the handwriting got a little messier every year. She dialed the number on the back, breath catching uneasy in her chest.

She turned the receipt over it was for a loaf of bread, a quart of milk and a packet of roll-your-owns, from somewhere called the Gravity Falls “Dusk 2 Dawn”. He was still in that little Oregon town, of all places. Now they'd both moved across the country and they weren’t that far apart. Geographically speaking anyway. _When did Ford take up smoking?_ She didn’t know. She'd only seen him once since she was seventeen.  Did she really know anything about her brother's life at all?

A man’s voice answered, slightly tinny and muffled like he wasn’t speaking properly into the receiver.

“Hi, you’ve reached the Mystery Shack. How can I help ya?” _Ugh, that old con job_. Why was Ford still dicking around with that? The man had a PhD in astrophysics and here he was selling knick-knacks and snow globes.

“Uh hello, I'm looking for Stanford Pines?”

“Speaking.” The voice changed slightly.  Becoming more recognisable, if a little suspicious.

“Oh. Oh right. Hi, Ford? it’s Sh-sher…” Her voice cracked unexpectedly.  She spluttered, forced to gasp for breath. “It's your sister, I… I…” Another slow rationed breath in. It had been seven years since they’d really spoken, he wouldn't spare her feelings so why bother returning the favour? Her eyes clenched shut. _Bite the bullet, Sherm._

“Shermy?” He sounded hesitant. “That you, honey?” The concern in his voice just drove the knife in harder. Where had he been? What fucking right did he have, coming over all sweetness and light?

“Mom’s dead, Stanford.” She said, flatly. It was all she could do. She may have had an English degree and a way with words but there was no way she could have spun these ones that would make them hurt less. She pretended the sharp breath on the other line didn’t make her chest hurt.

_He deserved to know. Even if he deserved nothing else._

‘Shermy? What- When? How?”

“Early This morning. Cancer. Dad’s staying with us right now. I- I just thought you ought to know.”

“I… _Shit._ Sherm. Cancer? Shit. Was it sudden?”

“Relatively, a matter of months. Liver. She was diagnosed in March”

He let out a gargling bark of frustration. “Months!? And you didn’t think to call sooner?”

His sister made a jagged noise, like broken glass. She'd meant it to be a laugh but it didn't sound like one.

“Oh fuck off, Stanford!  You haven’t been in touch in _seven years_! I didn’t want to _bother_ you, with all your _important_ work and all. I didn’t think you’d have time for family stuff.”

There was a pause on the line, then as if a long way off a muffled burst of expletives, in multiple languages and the sound of something…no several things… being pushed off a table.

“Shermaine” Stan’s voice was a crackly growl down the phone lines. “I’ll have to make some calls, but I’ll be in California within the week.  If you’ll have me.”

She closed her eyes, thank God. That was all she ever wanted.

“Yeah. Course. I- Thank you, Ford. This is one thing I just don’t know how to do alone.”

“You’re not alone without me, kid! What are ya talking about? You’ve got dad and little Isaac and uh… uh… David, its David right? You’re still married? And How old are the babies now?

“Yes? Of course we’re still married. Our girls are five, Miriam and Samantha.”

“Five? Shit. I’ve missed so much.”

“You didn’t exactly _try,_ Stanford. There's two sides to a phone call.”

“Ok, ok, I guess you got me there. Still is nice we got the second generation of Pine Twins running about.”

She paused, she could hear one of the girls giggling in the other room and the patter of feet. She didn’t want to think of her brothers at that age.

“I guess so, they're Chapman-Pines though. We hyphenated when we married.”

She didn’t change Isaac’s name, though, even if David was the only father he knew. That was his choice when he was old enough to decide. Plus, it meant there was someone to carry on the Pines family name, because it sure as hell wasn't going to be her brothers.

“Pines Twins are Pines Twins, Shermy. I’m glad someone’s carrying on the tradition.” There was a catch in his voice, a hitch in his breathing. But she ignored it in the interest of sibling harmony.

 “Can I call you, back later, Ford?” she said, clearing her throat. “I need to phone the rabbi and get started on making some arrangements. I'm sure he’ll be able to tell me if they can hold off the burial until you get here.”

“Yeah. Of course. Thanks, kid. I appreciate you filling me in, Look. Uh... I know I haven't been the greatest brother recently. I sure as hell wasn't the greatest son but I can at least try to be there, for this.

“That's all I'm asking of you, Ford.” _I’m not even expecting that much._ She thought harshly. _I won’t let myself be disappointed again._

“Ah, H-How's the old man doing, Sherm?”

“Pretty rough. You know what he's like, he’s hardly said a word at least the kiddos are keeping him distracted.” She sighed, tears rolling off her nose on to the desk. She sniffed hurriedly to keep her brother from hearing her cry.

“She loved you.”  She snarled, bitter, into the receiver. She felt physically sick. Her stomach was churning up a storm.  She wanted a long nap and a cigarette and she hadn’t smoked since high school.

“‘Scuse me?”

Shermy cleared her throat. “She said she loved you. Loves you? Shit, I don't know. I don't know anymore. _I'm tired_. She asked after both of you. I lied. I told her you were coming; she probably knew it was bull. Takes a professional liar to know one and everythin’ but I think it made her happy. I fuckin’ hope so.”

There was a long pause on the line. For a few seconds she wasn’t sure if Ford was still on the line until she heard his intake of breath.

“Why are you telling me this?”

She laughed, it was devoid of any humour. “Because I can't make you care. Because I can't ring you every week to check you still give a fuck. I'm not Ma, I'm not your goddamn nanny. I'm not going to force you to do anything you don't want to. Still, Ma loved you. You didn't even call. What's the odds the next time we talk it's just like this only five, ten years later? _Hm_? What's the odds that after the funeral next call I make to you starts off with ‘Hey Ford, Pops is dead’?

“Shermy- I”

“Oh stick up your ass Stanford. Just- you better actually come to the funeral or- God help me- I’ll drive down to Oregon and haul your ass up myself. You hear me?”

“Loud and Clear.” Her brother said, voice grave.

“I need to go. I’ll call you later to let you know the details.”

“Right.” Monotone, no inflection. “Later, Sherm.”

“Yeah. Bye.” She hung up, slamming the receiver into the cradle. With a burst of rage and adrenaline she shoved at a pile of books and manila folders she’d been keeping for work. They toppled to the floor with a crashing that wasn’t anywhere near as satisfying as it should have been.

She punched the desk, her knuckles connected with the wood sending white-hot pain though her hand.

“Shermy?” David’s voice from down the corridor, tinged with alarm. “You okay, love?”

She didn’t answer. She just rested her face in her arms and began to sob with no regard for volume or appearances. David’s footsteps echoed down the hallway and soon he was behind her wrapping her up in his arms.

It was never meant to end up like this, she thought, Picturing the sixteen-year-old girl who’d turned up young and terrified on The Mystery Shack doorstep and the brother who’d welcomed her in with open arms.

 They were never meant to grow so far apart.


	3. According to my Bond

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An AU Chapter, set in between Chapter 10 and 11 of WDW's "A Thousand Natural Shocks' with Shermy driving up to Oregon to meet the real Stanford. You don't have to know the fic to read this chapter but I recommend it because honestly it's amazing (and features Sherm herself).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone, I apologise for my hiatus but since I've just graduated life is kinda hectic for me and I've been mostly working on a novel of my own work which is eating most of my creativity.
> 
> However that said last night I read the lovely Dubs' latest chapter and went into a typing frenzy because damn I wanted to think about how Shermy would feel driving down alone to Oregon, to face something really ominous with no idea what was happening except that she was fairly sure one brother was having a breakdown and the other brother may not actually be dead. Obviously this is an AU in my universe as the reunion doesn't happen in this case, but strangely enough it lines up pretty well with a scrapped ending I had for the LaToSP.
> 
>  
> 
> (I listened to: [This version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YfDUBboUOA) of The Funeral by Band of Horses and [Black, Blue](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ6wt_TbY2c) by The Avett Brothers while writing this. The chapter's title is a quote from King Lear following Dubs' bardic theme, because nothing could be more relevant than a play about fucked up families.)

 

Shermaine Pines was a woman on a mission. She’d been driving for a while now. She’d switched off the radio about two hours into her journey because every sad song gravely reduced her field of vision. Now she was left in the quiet with her thoughts. It didn’t feel like an improvement.

Her phone hadn't stopped buzzing since she'd passed through Sacramento, she had one of those flash hands-free thingamajigs Isaac had installed for her but she'd already forgotten how to link her phone to the device itself. As a result, she'd used over 50% of her battery ignoring it’s electronic screaming alone. It was starting to get on her nerves.

Finally, when she could bear it no longer she pulled over on a tiny unsealed back road. A road she’d chosen in the (admittedly mistaken) belief that she could out drive her GPS’ estimated time of arrival.

She grabbed her chirping phone, the happy little marimbas might as well have been an air-raid siren for all she cared right now.

“What!?” It was a frantic banshee screech down the phone line. She hadn't checked to see who was calling so if it was a client that’d probably be highly unprofessional. Shermy didn't care. She was too fucking tired to care.

“Jeeee-zus, you’re worse off than I thought.” Came a woman’s voice in reply, insolent and familiar and so definitely not her brother. Shermy relaxed ever so slightly as the caller carried on “Let’s try that again, how’s about: Hello, my darling daughter. Blood of my blood, fruit of my loins. However, can I help you this fine -uh-afternoon?”

“Cut the fuckin lip, Miriam.” She took a shaky breath in and all of a sudden felt like crying. She was all over the place emotionally and she didn’t know why. Maybe it was early menopause or something. “Sorry, sweetheart. But I can’t do this right now…I’m- I’m drivin’ here honey. My hands free ain't workin’, and I gotta keep both hands on the wheel.” She'd been pulled over for a while now but she needed an excuse as she didn't have the heart to scream at her own child.

Miriam was not pacified. “Then pull over, you’ve got a good 10 hours’ worth of driving to do you can afford a five-minute break, Hell you probably need one.”

“Your dad’s been in touch then.” Shermy rubbed her face with her hands her skin felt rubbery beneath her fingertips.   _Godammit David_ , his heart was in the right place but she _so_ didn’t need this right now.

“He’s freakin’ out, Ma. Worried you’ve gone off your meds and scared you’re gonna drive on through the whole night without thinking of yourself.”

Shermy rolled her eyes. “I told him where I was going and I e-mailed my editor, I’m not gonna fuckin’ just vamoose without tellin’ anyone am I? I’m not that dramatic.” She frowned. “Miriam I’m not that dramatic, am I?”

“I plead the fifth.” Said her daughter.

Shermy made a noise that may have been a laugh or a growl and even she wasn’t sure which it was “Want do you want, Merm?”

“I’m just checking in, Ma. Are- Are you okay?”

Shermy sighed, watching the white bone of her knuckles pop up underneath her skin. “No, but I’ll be feeling much better once I punch the truth right outta your uncle.”

Her daughter groaned “Please chill for once in your life, Mom. Izzy and Dad can’t afford to bail you out of an Oregon prison.”

She smacked her lips together. “Then I won’t get caught.”

Miriam laughed at that. “Don’t kill anyone, yeah? The gremlins would be really sad if you offed their favourite Grunkle.”

“I’m not gonna kill nobody, relax. You should call your sister, Miriam.”

There was an uncomfortable pause and Miriam huffed out a sigh. “Shit c’mon, can we please not go there?” She whined.

“You kids are so lucky. So f-fuckin’ lucky ya don’t even _know_.” Sherm’s voice cracked and blistered, it was hardly dignified. If anything it just made her angry. She wiped bitterly at her misting eyes.

Miriam hesitated, when she spoke she sounded soft and fond. “Ma…Are you crying?”

Shermy, like a true journalist, declined to comment.  “You got a family, Miriam. You got the best dad a kid could have, you got a brother, a sister, a little niece and nephew. All those people to love you, and It’s hard, I know, when you’re living on the other side of the country from your home, I remember it myself. You got technology now. We didn’t have that back when I first came to California.”

“True, but can you imagine Zaidi Pines ever using Skype?” She snickered. “That’d be a damn miracle, no disrespect to the man or anything.”

“Nah,” Shermy barked back. “Full disrespect. Fuck him and his sunglasses.”

She heard her daughter laugh down the phone line and for a second she didn’t feel like the world was caving on to her shoulders.

“Call your sister, baby.” She said again, it was a command this time. In her heart they were still the matching pink blanket bundles they'd brought home from the hospital, not women in their twenties with lives and loves and vendettas of their own.

Down the line Miriam made a noise of frustration. “Look, Ma-” she started.

Another sob shook Shermy’s shoulders, entirely unwelcome. She ignored it and hoped she’d raised Miriam with enough sense to do the same. “Jus’-Jus’ _call_ her. You don’t know what ya got til it’s gone.” With that, not waiting for a reply she hung up her phone, turned it off and threw it into the backseat.

“There ya go again, Sherm, she muttered bitterly to the manila folders and empty coffee cups that littered the floor of the passenger seat. “Carryin’ on the long-standing Pines family tradition of crying in cars.”

She didn’t know how she was supposed to feel. There was usually some kind of prompt for her, if David were here then she’d have a sounding board to pull something coherent out of the hurricane in her head. She was old and tired, and she wasn’t yet out of California. She wanted this all to be a prank, some kind of misunderstanding. But she’d inherited her father’s luck and all her jackpots came too late and with too high a price to make any kind of difference.

She was trying to put off all her own snotty embarrassment by ignoring how much she needed a proper cry. So She tried to run through the kids’ stories from the summer, corroborate a theory. They knew about Stanley now. Even though there had been a reason Isaac and Laura never told them, and she’d supported her son’s decision… but it seemed now they’d needn’t have worried. If anything since returning from Gravity Falls Mabel and Dipper were closer than ever.

 “Thank god.” she whispered into the air, hands curled to fists and loose tears slipping down her cheeks once more. At least the kids were unscathed. She closed her eyes.

 _When they put the coffin in the earth her mother screamed_.

Shermy was forty-five years old but she could feel it in her fucking bones. There had been something so primal almost inhuman to the sound. It had never left her.

The memory always surfaced like an old slideshow. The order never changed.

This was how it went:

_The coffin descends._

_Her mother screams, staggering towards the open grave._

_Shermy catches a glimpse of her dark braid flying out behind her._

_Her father holds her mother back and she doubles over wailing, keening uninhibited._

_here is none of her usual misdirection, no well-established façade. She can’t lie her way out of this. So she screams and screams and doesn’t stop._

_Eleven-year-old Shermy Pines clings a little tighter to her brother’s arm._

_The rabbi starts back up again_ _and everything feels so so very wrong._

_Everything has changed._

She sat, forty-five years old in her car on a tree-lined back road in Northern California somewhere. , Her elbows at right angles resting on the steering wheel, her head in her hands. She let the crying come and go naturally like the tide.

If Ford wasn’t lying, or drunk or delusional- and ignoring for the moment the body her parents had gone to identify, returning home to her, grey-skinned and hollow-  assuming Stanley (The conman she’d never met, the shadow passing over her doorstep on her parents’ Jahrzeits, the brother she’d loved and mourned but never known.) had somehow faked his own death.

The question was _why_?

Oh sure, the ‘how’s’ were interesting from a journalistic point-of-view. But as Stan’s sister? She couldn’t give a blistered bleeding fuck about whatever showman’s magic trick he’d pulled off. She was hurt. The kids didn’t deserve this; she didn’t deserve this. Shit, even her dead Ma didn’t deserve this kind of emotional fuckery. Thinking about it for too long made her wanna hurl.

She had to know the truth.

She wiped her eyes with her right hand, at the same time her eyes were shut tight she whispered out a prayer in plain English.

“Whatever happens, whatever happened to him. Give me the strength to accept it and move on. My family is what matters, and I will let no man tear my family asunder.” She snarled the last bit, both her brother’s and her father’s faces flashing in her mind.

She felt her words hang open-ended in the air. As she tucked her hair behind her ears and wiped her eyes and nose on a tissue she'd found in her pocket, she recited the Mourner’s Kiddush with the soothing lilt rote memory afforded her. She couldn’t think of any other blessings more appropriate for how she was feeling.  She said it for her parents, the mother she never gave enough credit to, the father she’d made her peace with but would never quite forgive and for both her brothers.

Her brothers: Stanley as the photo on her parent’s mantelpiece, as the New Jersey headstone she’d visited as a girl and Stanford as she knew and loved him; complex, impulsive, rough but ultimately caring. She kept them all in her thoughts and with the last line she let them go, out the window into the Californian afternoon.

_"Oseh shalom bimromav,_  
_Hu yaaseh shalom aleinu,_  
_v'al kol Yisrael. V'imru. Amen."_

With that said,  Shermy Pines steeled her veins with diamond, and put the car in drive.


End file.
